Background

The first thing to notice about this one-page paper by Worobey et al. is the media blitz that has preceded it. It has been heavily promoted on Nature's web-site for five days before publication, and features an embargo date, in the hope of ensuring coordinated media coverage.

Over the last three and a half years, doctors Hilary Koprowski and Stanley Plotkin have made a series of false allegations about my book The River. Among these is the claim that the book has caused the collapse of polio vaccination programmes in Africa and elsewhere, and that I am therefore personally responsible for many deaths, and for the failure to eradicate poliomyelitis from the planet.

In 1999, when my book The River was published, considerable publicity was given to the theory that AIDS might have arisen as a result of a contaminated oral polio vaccine (OPV) called CHAT, which was fed to roughly a million persons in central Africa between 1957 and 1960.

The Marx/Drucker theory of iatrogenic spread through unsterile needles, and the recent intervention by Professor David Gisselquist, who claims that most HIV infections in Africa are caused through this same route

by Edward Hooper

The most interesting counter-argument against the OPV theory of origin of AIDS has been put forward by two American scientists, Preston Marx and Ernest Drucker. [See: "Serial human passage of simian immunodeficiency virus by unsterile injections and the emergence of epidemic human immunodeficiency virus in Africa", by P.A. Marx, P.G. Alcabes and E. Drucker, Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. Lond. B; 2001; 356; 911-920.] They take the cut hunter/natural transfer scenario (which theoretically could have occurred at any time in the last few million years, since chimps and humans became separate species), and invest it with a necessary time-frame. They do this by proposing that there was an amplification factor, this being the arrival in Africa of disposable needles (which were none the less reused). Apparently needle deliveries to Africa experienced an exponential rise in the 1950s.

The paper presented by Edward Hooper at the 2001 Lincei Conference, published in Atti dei Convegni Lincei; 2003; 187; 27-230.

This major essay, based on the speech Ed Hooper gave at the National Academy of Lincei, in Rome, in September 2001, was originally prepared for publication in the house journal, Atti dei Convegni Lincei. It is over 200 pages long, and represents Hooper's major published response to the web of disinformation and misleading claims that certain members of the scientific community have created in response to "The River", and in the wake of the Royal Society meeting on "Origins of HIV and the AIDS epidemic". Hooper suggests that this essay represents useful base-line reading for any visitors to this site who are seriously interested in the question of how the AIDS pandemic began.